A New Way To Travel Through Space

Traveling through space is the goal of many scientists. They want to be able to travel at a reasonable rate of speed on one hand and yet use the least amount of fuel on the other hand. When we first look at this problem, it seems that this can not be done. Well if you think that it can't, you might be correct. Having said this, new methods of space travel are being discovered all the time. Some of these methods increase the speed of our vehicles and others save fuel. While we have not been able to join the two together yet, we seem to be developing two distinct methods of travel. I would like to tell you about a new discovery that would have really surprised scientists just a few years ago.

Gravity Waves In The Ocean Seen From A Satellite
Photo Source: NASA

One has to think about how the oceans of earth are constructed to understand what I am about to say. Our oceans have currents and sailors of old took advantage of these currents to travel to many different distant places in their sailing ships. The currents would help propel the ship along with its sail, this cut time off of the voyage. Maps were made of these currents and they were used to circumnavigate the globe. Guess what? Currents have been discovered in space. Scientists are now saying that using these currents can save a substantial amount of fuel. Yes fuel will be needed, but far less than we use now. There is another plus, these currents take you directly to where you destination is. An example of this is that you might sail one of these currents directly to a planet or moon. Yes sail is a good word for this, but I guess we could substitute the word ride in its place.

As with everything in life there are tradeoffs. In this case the tradeoff is speed. Using currents it could take months just to circle Jupiter's moon system. It looks to me like this might not be the ideal way to travel for manned flights to other worlds, but might be just the ticket for space and ore freighters delivering cargos to earth. This type of travel could knock a lot of the expense off of a flight and as time progresses, it might become possible to use robotic ships for this duty. Think of giant ore ships getting their cargoes from distant moons and planets, then sailing a current back to earth orbit where their cargo is unloaded to vehicles that are returning to earth, or maybe back to the moon where we have already built processing plants.

The currents are created because gravity is balanced out in these areas. Right now scientists are busy mapping out these currents much in the same way as they were mapped out in our oceans. They describe the currents as free fall areas. The currents in space are gravitational currents. In case you think that this concept is a red herring, there has already been one mission that has used these currents and that was the Genesis spacecraft. It crashed, but this had nothing to do with the concept we discussed. The problem was that its chute did not deploy. It had demonstrated that it only needed about 10% of the usual amount of fuel to reach its target. One thing that I am curious about and don't really know the answer to, is what happens if you get into one of these currents and decide to go as fast as you can? Will our ship gain increased speed because you are riding a gravity wave?

Solar Sail
Photo Source:
GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.2 or later

Another system that could be tied in with these gravity waves might be solar sails. Solar sails are defined by Wikipedia as, "Solar sails (also called light sails or photon sails) are a form of spacecraft propulsion using the radiation pressure of light from a star, or laser to push enormous ultra-thin mirrors to high speeds." If the radiation from the sun is used to power our mythical solar sail and we are also riding a gravity wave, we would be using almost no fuel at all for out trip through space. This seems like an ideal way for combining two technologies at the moment. In the future when we find ways of traveling the solar system in just a day or two, or maybe even faster, then of course it will probably be abandoned, unless it is so cheap to move items that way, that the wait is worth it.

One the other end of space travel is the new Ion engine. It is said to be able to make travel anywhere in our solar system reasonable. It is much faster than the old Ion engine and if we can tie it in with the new electronic radiation and micro meteor shield, it should make such trips safe. Today a trip of more than a few days exposes the occupants of a space ship to all sources of cosmic and solar radiation, which could take years off of their lives. I have spoken about this before and it is one of the reasons that even though we could probably reach Mars in a manned ship, the crew would have been exposed to so much radiation that they would surely be affected in different negative ways and then there would be the repeat trip home. They might be spending as much as three years total, or more in space. Even if a lead lined room could be provided on a spaceship, the crew could not live in it on such long duration trips, it would only be good for the occasional protection against solar flares and such.

Zeppelin
Photo Source:
GNU Free Documentation License
Version 1.2 or later

This whole topic of riding gravity waves sort of reminds me of the effort on earth to use blimps and dirigibles again for hauling cargo. The reason I bring this up is that they would take longer to move cargo, but they would be much cheaper than air freight and maybe even cargo ships. There is a sort of parallel with this and wanting to use gravity waves to ride to different planets and their moons. Will this ever become a reality? It certainly does look like it will and for all we know it may have been used a lot more than we know. One has to remember that we are not privy to a lot of the things going on in the government.